


Make the World

by pigeon_hawk



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-16 21:12:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16502795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeon_hawk/pseuds/pigeon_hawk
Summary: After Harry's unexpected death, Draco dives deep into the exploration and manipulation of alternate realities, searching for one where Harry survives.He finds what he's looking for.(Told in 2nd person)





	Make the World

When you managed to unravel the strands of causality - gently loosening the tangles and snags that represented your daughter; the morning with the snow blossoms; the day in second year when you got lost in the woods together and spilled all your worst secrets - you realized for the first time that the thing could be done. You were looking for a chain of unbroken events that would not end in your lover's untimely death. You swore that among the billions of alternate realities - all cascading, all co-dependent - you would find the one where he survived.  
  
And here it is. One single strand. One reality out of billions. It's a narrow road, but you'll take it.  
  
You adjust your grip. It's delicate work, lonely work, to say nothing of being highly illegal. You brush the strands of fine blonde hair from your forehead and sit back against your chair to examine the causal thread.  
  
It's longer than you expected. Tragedies, if they can be averted at all, usually depend on a single recent (often random) event. Being caught with someone else's husband; insulting a relative; forgetting to buy the milk. Harry's thread looks like it stretches back for years; decades, even. The triggering event - whatever it was - took place when you and he were both children. Curious, you run your fingers along the length of it and hold it up to the light.  
  
Everything you see is strange and stretched, like seeing yourself reflected in the surface of a tea kettle. He is still your Harry - that much is clear. He laughs the same laugh. He is generous. When he smiles, something crackles in your chest, and you swallow back a sob. If this works, you know he'll be that way again.  
  
But everything else comes in at odd angles to your own version of reality. Every scene where the two of you appear together is filled with spitting and senseless rage. There's no softness there, in what should be the softest place in Harry's otherwise miserable childhood. You skip ahead to find the two of you dueling furiously; skip backward and are horrified to see yourself, a pillar of wrath, smashing his face on the floor of a train compartment.  
  
It is natural that you should feel some panic at this juncture.  
  
It shows that you are thinking clearly.  
  
The places where the threads are most difficult to untangle represent events so likely and necessary to the orderly progress of time that they occur again and again, in wildly disparate realities, anchoring near universes to one another.  
  
But none of those major events in your lives together are present here. This thread - the one that will safeguard his life and happiness - has come untethered from the rest, an anomaly twisting free in the unknowable recesses of space, and it is the one in which Harry has despised you since the moment you first met.  
  
You cry a little - not too much. It seems unfair that saving his life should require you lose him in such a fundamental way. Fate's an evil bastard, etc. But you never doubt that you will follow through.  
  
You speak the incantation. You wind the thread upon the loom, push the treadle, and re-make the world. After a minute something breaks inside your chest, and it is the easiest thing in the world to let him go.

**Author's Note:**

> I got the idea for this after reading Chaos Theory by tessacrowley.


End file.
